thinkIntranet Strategic Intranet Management

Here’s my FOAF file:

Part 1

Determining business value has always been a difficult aspect of any Intranet management strategy, and many Intranet strategies fall short in this area. IBF’s Business Value quadrant evaluates members for how well they track ROI and any intangible benefits of Intranet programs and services. In addition, the importance of this area has prompted IBF to launch a project to develop a financial value tool to assess the total value of a company Intranet.

Meanwhile, the rumblings of a possible recession in the US and Europe are causing businesses in all sectors to tighten their belts. Now is a good time to make sure your Intranet’s value proposition is well thought-out. Even without a fully-baked business value model in place, there are some quick things you can do to protect your team and your mission:

Here’s what I think it’s important to think about when deploying a Wiki/Blog environment:

I think Wiki/Blog (let’s just say self-service publishing) can be very powerful where processes for publishing “formal” information channels to the Intranet are in place. That is to say, if the right people are publishing to the right place on the Intranet and have the right editorial flows/governance around that, then adding an open, less-structured layer to that is fine. If, on the other hand, if there are no good controls/process/tools in place, then handing everyone a Wiki is too loose a solution, in most cases.

Certainly there are models of total self-publishing which have worked well. Rational, for example, followed that model but this was a particularly techy and tight corporate culture (at least, before IBM acquired it ;) ). So overall, my advice would be to make sure they have their formal content publishing ducks in a row before introducing self-publishing, and I certainly would not advocate replacing a full-blown CMS with a Wiki.

“Intranet effectiveness” is one way to approach Intranet governance. It can succeed where where the company Intranet is large, scattered and when there are concerns about quality and cost of Intranet sites and applications. Also, this approach fits well where a traditional top-down governance model has not been successful. The idea behind effectiveness is to offer a more holistic way of identifying what makes a “good” Intranet site vs. a poor one. Effectiveness criteria go beyond “look and feel” to ask questions about useage, support, help and feedback, search and usability. Look and feel is important, but it’s not the only thing to look at when evaluating an Intranet.

Effectiveness programs can succeed by empowering site owners to rate their own sites. Creating a scorecard tool or even offering criteria in a simple spreadsheet document, site owners can answer the questions about effectiveness and rate their own sites, taking ownership of site quality, rather than having the more traditional “corporate says” approach which can create bad feeling.